Written by: Jerry Barca

History has been made. The Buffalo Bills named Kathryn Smith the team’s quality control-special teams coach, making Smith the first full-time female coach in NFL history.

The move forwards a trend of women coaching men on the professional level.

For decades, women have made headway in men’s sports, becoming front office executives in professional franchises and athletic administrators on the college level. While it has been accepted that men can coach women, the opposite hasn’t been true. Well, until recently.

Smith’s hiring follows moves made by the Arizona Cardinals and the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, which brought women into the coaching ranks of mainstream men’s professional sports.

Spurs assistant Becky Hammon became the first full-time woman assistant coach in the NBA, or any of the major professional sports leagues in the country, in August 2014. Last summer, Hammon was the head coach of the Spurs team that won the NBA’s Las Vegas Summer League. She was the first woman to hold that role and win that offseason championship.

Jen Welter became the first female coach in the NFL last summer when she served as a training camp and preseason intern working with the Cardinals’ linebackers.

Buffalo coach Rex Ryan said he consulted with Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians on hiring a female coach. “You can see the success some of these young ladies are having in the coaching profession, such as the young lady that is an assistant to Coach (Gregg) Popovich at the San Antonio Spurs, and realize how exciting this is for women like Kathryn Smith as well as the Bills organization,” Ryan said in news release on the team’s website.

Smith steps into her role with more than a decade of experience working in the NFL. She started in 2003 as a game-day/special-events intern with the New York Jets, a role she held while attending St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y.

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